Cars were also like this. At the turn of the century, horses were considered a massive public health problem, because there were just so much horse feces and d

Cars were also like this. At the turn of the century, horses were considered a massive public health problem, because there were just so much horse feces and dead horses lying on the streets in major cities. > On average a horse will produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day, so you can imagine the sheer scale of the problem. The manure on London’s streets also attracted huge numbers of flies which then spread typhoid fever and other diseases. Each horse also produced around 2 pints of urine per day and to make things worse, the average life expectancy for a working horse was only around 3 years. Horse carcasses therefore also had to be removed from the streets. The bodies were often left to putrefy so the corpses could be more easily sawn into pieces for removal. The streets of London were beginning to poison its people. But this wasn’t just a British crisis: New York had a population of 100,000 horses producing around 2.5m pounds of manure a day. This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.” Of course, now particularly in the US we see many downsides from having nearly totally shifted to a car-only culture. But that seems to have been preferable to managing the logistics of millions of pounds of horse manure. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-Horse-Manure-Crisis-of-1894/ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great...